


the changing leaf upon the air

by Damkianna



Category: Battle: Los Angeles (2011)
Genre: Alien Technology, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Kissing, Parallel Universes, Pining, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:08:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27786502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damkianna/pseuds/Damkianna
Summary: The alien FOB was visible from a couple klicks away.
Relationships: Michael Nantz/Elena Santos
Comments: 10
Kudos: 10
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	the changing leaf upon the air

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jedibuttercup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedibuttercup/gifts).



> Your suggestion for an AU with Nantz as a civilian ... expanded in kind of a different direction than I thought it would, jedibuttercup. This isn't quite that AU, and it isn't quite a time loop story, either—but it's got some of the spirit of each, plus a handful of other things, and I hope you like it. ♥!
> 
> Title borrowed from "[... Seeing the Changing Leaf](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=23995)" by David Morton.

The alien FOB was visible from a couple klicks away.

Either it was smaller than their command-and-control structure had been, Santos thought, or it was way, way bigger, and buried even deeper.

She was pretty sure it was smaller. All their intel suggested that this FOB had been set up quick, hasty, a rush job in the aftermath of the CNC's destruction. The readings that had brought them out here and gotten them redeployed this deep inside what was left of LA had only started up about ninety minutes ago.

But the thing was, it didn't matter. Not really. They weren't even supposed to be out here. They weren't even supposed to be _alive_. They were ragtag and patchwork, half a squad of Marines with a staff sergeant for a commanding officer, plus the Air Force tagalong they hadn't quite managed to shake yet. But they could still hold guns, and they had work to do.

_Retreat? Hell!_

Wasn't even Santos's unit. She didn't know where the fuck she was going to end up, after this mess was over. But she felt that shit in her bones anyway. It was a stupid thing to think, day like this, but she couldn't help it; some part of her deep down was mindlessly sure that she'd been meant to find the 2-5, that she'd always been supposed to end up blasting aliens to bits with these assholes. She'd loved the Air Force, before. But it was never going to be the same for her after this. She knew that much already.

They got dropped about four klicks out, well inside the hot zone—a defensive line had been formed across the city, holding back the aliens' frantic attempts to keep advancing even without air support, and there were divisions setting up to the north and south to squeeze the alien flanks, generate enough pressure to make room for drops along the beach itself to cut the aliens off from the ocean. Command wanted them limited to city water, city sewers, in the hope that it would make the movements of their ground forces predictable.

And here was the 2-5 right in the middle of it, because of course they were.

The helo couldn't risk landing, but they were used to that by now. They rappelled, just like they had back at the CNC. It wasn't a comfort to be back in the middle of this shitstorm, surrounded on all sides. That was the wrong word for it in every possible sense. But Santos had always gotten a charge out of being under fire—knowing she needed to have her head on straight, focused, alert, doing a job she'd trained for, a job she was fucking spectacular at. And she felt it now, that spark, the live wire of it just under her skin, every inch of her awake and aware even though it had been about thirty-eight hours since she'd slept.

They were going in quick, quiet. Recon, in a sense: the readings that were coming off this FOB were like nothing else anybody had seen before, on a day full of shit nobody had ever seen before. They needed to know what it meant, what was causing it, and, if necessary, how to blow it up— _everybody_ needed to know it, so the rest of the world could act on that intel if they caught readings like these, too, the same way the word had been passed about disabling the alien drones. It wasn't about LA, and it wasn't about the United States; they were here to save everyone on Earth, now.

The first three klicks were easy enough. The aliens had pulled back, defensive, trying to hold what they'd already taken and patch something together that would put their drones back in the air. They weren't patrolling the streets wiping out anything alive that wasn't them. It was almost quiet, aside from the crackle of the fires that were still burning, the occasional distant sound of concrete rubble settling, and the 2-5 made good time.

The FOB itself—or at least that was what they were guessing it was—was squat, rounded, with strange protruding sections like bones, ribs. It looked almost like the alien drone-ships, the way they looked when they were all packed together into a single circular flyer.

"All right," Nantz said, low, when they were about half a klick out, the thing hulking over them. He cast a glance back over them and tilted his head, and they huddled up; nothing gave you a sense for a CO's style, what he was looking for from you and how he'd ask for it, like a couple days counting on him not to let you die if he could help it.

He gave his orders quick, quiet, only as many words as he needed to explain the gestures he was making with his hands. Lockett and Imlay on the left, Nantz and Adukwu on the right, Santos and Harris up the middle. Take out any aliens, any guards, and try to get inside—regroup, on the interior, and keep moving from there.

They'd been sent because they were a small team, because they could move fast; nobody had wanted to dwell on why, on how exactly it was they'd ended up trimmed down to half a dozen. And, Santos thought, because they were stupid enough to have been willing to redeploy.

But they should've been outnumbered by a lot more than they were. Santos stuck to Harris's shoulder, and caught herself muttering it under her breath: "Right of the heart. Right of the heart." She got one, two, and then Lockett shot a third out from in front of her before she could add it to her tally; Harris got two, and then they were there, at the base of the structure. Imlay and Lockett were still shooting, and so was Nantz, but Santos couldn't stop thinking there should have been more of them. More aliens, maybe one or two of those heavy-arms rigs they'd had on the freeway.

Maybe they were struggling—maybe they were having an even harder time redeploying themselves, with no air support. Maybe there were reinforcements on the way, and they just hadn't gotten here yet.

In which case the 2-5 needed to get their asses in gear.

Santos looked at the wall of the structure, and then at Harris. There were no obvious seams, no joins, nothing that looked like a hinge or a door; nowhere between them and either of the nearest ribs, either. So there wasn't a door, or else they just couldn't see it.

"Grenade?" Santos said.

"Couldn't hurt," Harris agreed.

The shooting stopped. No more aliens, Santos assumed, and felt her shoulders drop a little; nobody could've run out of ammo, not yet, not the way they'd loaded themselves up when they made it to the Mojave. The rest of the team fanned out in Santos's peripheral vision: covering them, and damn, that had no right to feel as good as it did. She'd always been part of a squad one way or another. She'd always known somebody had her back. But there was a difference between knowing it and _feeling_ it, knowing it and having somebody die just to get your ass out of the fire, and it was a bigger difference than she'd understood it would be before today.

Everybody but her and Harris was clear. She grabbed Harris and together they went for cover, a couple cracked concrete barriers not too far away, and threw themselves low, and then the grenades blew. Two of them, because Santos figured if they were going to do this they might as well commit.

She could tell it had worked even before the smoke cleared, just by the way it looked: the sudden dark pit of shadow the smoke had to drift away into, the way the color of it changed as it thinned out. And then the first ragged edge of the structure's broken-open shell was visible, and Imlay and Harris both whooped.

Santos grinned, and looked reflexively for Nantz. He was staring at it, looking grim and determined—but also, maybe, a little smug.

Still no smile. But she had faith that she could get one out of him sooner or later. If she could take out an alien FOB that was holding god-knew-what with a team of six and no backup, she could do anything.

She and Harris were through first. The aliens had heard the grenades go off, or—did they have ears? They'd detected it, at least, however they did things like that. But the hole made it easy, gave them a choke point: the aliens couldn't get to them without going through it, couldn't even shoot them without lining up to aim through it, and all she and Harris had to do was shoot first.

Right of the heart. Right of the heart. And then they were down, and the two who were behind them, one more after that; and then it went quiet, and no matter how Santos squinted she couldn't see anything else moving in there.

"Clear?" Nantz said.

"Think so, Staff Sergeant," Santos told him, and ducked through to check, Harris at her shoulder, before he could tell her to.

It was dim inside, lit up faintly orange—some more of those weird power devices were set along the walls, same as they'd seen in the sewers, charging up on water with flickers of blue-white arc lightning.

There were no hallways, no corridors. Just a big round space, radial divisions where the rib-bones of the structure curved in and crossed the floor, but no walls or anything.

Man, if this was the way they were used to buildings being built, LA architecture must have seemed cramped as hell.

It looked a little like the CNC had, Santos thought. A little like the drones did, the way they fit themselves together into larger flyers. Modular. Like they'd been able to build this sucker on the spot this fast because all they'd had to do was get enough ribs and walls in place and then click them together like Legos.

And there was something in the middle of the room.

Santos pointed it out to Nantz; Nantz nodded toward it, made eye contact with each of them in turn and then jabbed a hand forward, and they advanced, fanned out, each of them covering sixty degrees as carefully as they could.

Three more aliens turned out to be crowded around whatever it was, almost invisible in the dimness until they started chittering and firing. One of them caught Imlay in the arm with a bolt that sizzled, but Lockett twisted around and hammered it with half a dozen bullets, so it didn't get a second shot. Imlay was pale under the dirt on his face, strained, but he could still stand, so Nantz kept them moving.

And—that was it. Santos should have been grateful, maybe, but she didn't like that one bit. This was the biggest on-shore alien structure they'd been able to detect aboveground; no way was it being manned by twenty of these things with no heavy arms and no backup. There had to be something bigger coming: reinforcements, or worse.

Which meant they should move their asses and get this done before whatever it was got here and stopped them.

She'd rigged up a portable scanner out of the stuff they'd let her borrow from the Mojave FOB. The readings they'd been picking up miles off were definitely coming from in here, and specifically from the weird glowing thing in the middle of this chamber.

It looked, at a glance, kind of like the top of the alien CNC—that spiraling jagged tower they'd _thought_ was the important part, until the whole thing had lifted off in front of them and proven them wrong. It was lit up, orange along the sides and yellow-white at the top, same color as the propulsion on the drone aircraft. And it was pulsing, slow and steady, like maybe those aliens crowded around it had been activating it or something, getting it set up and ready to use.

"What's it doing, Santos?"

"No idea, Staff Sergeant," Santos said, honest, leaning down to peer at it. Were those markings along the sides, deliberate, maybe alien text? Or just decorative patterns? Maybe not even decorative, maybe it was just how things looked once aliens were done soldering them. Like she knew.

"You've got two minutes to see whether you can figure it out, get us any intel we can turn over when we get back to base. Then we blow it," Nantz said.

"Yes, sir," Santos said.

It was worth the attempt. Maybe the device was just a device, a scanner of some kind, the center of an alien communications array. Or maybe it was a bomb, in which case they were going to need to clear a very different kind of blast radius before they detonated anything next to it.

Worst case, if they couldn't figure anything out—she'd lie, get the rest of them as far away from it as possible and blow it herself, just to be sure.

It was only as much as Nantz would've done to keep the rest of them safe, and she was discovering that that was a standard she wanted to hold herself to, if she could.

She gave herself an extra second just to look at him, sheer self-indulgence in case this thing was about to kill her. Figured, that she'd accidentally land the best CO she'd ever had at the end of the world, and it would be somebody from a completely different branch of the military—somebody she might easily never have met, let alone had the chance to serve under, if aliens hadn't happened to invade. Just her luck.

And it didn't hurt one bit that he was pretty goddamn nice to look at, even with all the blood and sweat and crap, covering him as much as any of the rest of them.

She ducked down next to the device, and Harris followed suit, pushing his glasses up his nose—he'd lost his own hours ago, but somebody must have dug up some spares for him at the Mojave FOB, and just the thought was enough to make her smile.

"Readings telling you anything?" he said.

"Nothing we didn't know already," she told him, hitching one shoulder up in half a shrug. "Thing's pulling power like crazy—even more now than it was when we first picked it up. Whole bunch of frequencies coming out of it, but not radio, not visual, not anything they could make heads or tails out of back on base." She tilted her head, and pointed to the side of it. "That look like writing to you?"

"Maybe," Harris said, squinting at it doubtfully.

She wasn't even trying to do anything to it. She just wanted to get a look at the other side, see whether the same marks were over there. Maybe she had kind of centered herself in front of it; maybe she did have a hand on either side of it. But she didn't realize she'd touched it until she already had, and then it was too late.

She couldn't move, couldn't see—everything had gone white, her vision blank and full of light. Her head felt like it was in a vise, sudden throbbing pain like her skull was suddenly a size too small for everything that was inside of it. She couldn't tell whether she was making noise, crying out; she thought she might be, hoped she wasn't, but there was no way for her to be sure, like this.

The first thing she _did_ hear, when the rushing ringing nothingness had cleared out of her ears, was Nantz, shouting her name, hoarse and frantic.

And then the pain in her head settled abruptly to a dull pulsing, and she blinked—could tell she was blinking, could see the shape of the device in front of her again. And in between her and everything, her and the rest of the world, there was some kind of display, lines of light.

"Santos," Nantz said again, quieter but more urgent; he'd dropped to a knee, shifted his gun to his off hand and was gripping her shoulder.

"Sir," she croaked, and blinked a couple more times. The light didn't go away. "You seeing this?"

"Seeing what?"

Okay, so there was her answer. "I—don't know," she managed. "Some kind of overlay. Grid in the background, but it's all curved. There's labels, readouts. I don't know what any of it says. And these rows of—indicators. They must be organized somehow, but I can't tell what—"

"Hold on, hold on," Nantz said, calm now, steady. "Slow down," and it was only when he said it that she realized how she'd been rushing, slurring the words together, breath coming so fast she was practically gasping.

She made herself stop, gulped in air and then let it out again more slowly. When she closed her eyes, the overlay was still there behind her eyelids, shifting lines and glowing shapes, arranged in a pattern that probably made inherent sense to the aliens but only made her vaguely nauseated.

She opened her eyes again and looked at Nantz, and the pattern of the indicators changed; there were markers arranged around him, around the shape of his face; around Harris, in the edge of her vision, and herself, her own hand.

"They're still there," he said, and she blinked and looked at him again—he must have been able to see it, the way her gaze had been tracking something invisible to him.

"Yeah," she said, even though he clearly knew already. "It must be a—a control interface for the device. This must be how it works."

And then, abruptly, one of the indicator shapes near the bottom of the display came alight, glowing orange.

"Something's changed," Santos said aloud.

Maybe she'd done it—looked at it more than once, or at one of the labels for it, and the interface was tracking the movements of her eyes. She had no idea. But it was glowing orange and pulsing, the same way the device was pulsing; and then it started going faster, faster, and shit, maybe she couldn't read any of the text but she still had a pretty good guess what that meant.

"Get out of here."

"Santos," Nantz said, sharp.

"I mean it, sir. There's something wrong, it's—it's counting down. I don't know what it's going to do. You need to clear the room."

"Then so do you, Tech Sergeant," he said, and didn't let go of her arm.

"With all due respect, Staff Sergeant," she bit out, "Jesus fucking Christ—"

"Lockett, Harris, you heard her, secure our exit. Adukwu, Imlay—"

"Good to go, sir," Imlay said, even though Adukwu was still busy securing a bandage around the burn on his arm.

"No, sir, you need to go now," Santos said, and Nantz looked at her, jaw set; the indicator that was highlighted was flashing brighter, so rapid now it was almost strobing, and then it was—she couldn't see past it anymore, only knew Nantz was still there because she could feel his hand on her arm, and then that was gone too, and everything went brilliant and strange and silent, and she was somewhere else.

Her breath caught in her throat. She coughed it out, and raised a hand to rub at her eyes—and then she stared at that hand, because it didn't have a glove on it, and it should have. It didn't have a glove, and her wrist, her forearm, were bare too. She was—she didn't have her gear, couldn't feel the strap of her M16 on her shoulder; she looked down at herself, and she was wearing a t-shirt, torn, streaked with ash and dust, one sleeve tattered and blackened and her upper arm hastily bandaged underneath, the muscle seeping sharp pain and the skin screaming bloody murder in a way she recognized as a serious second-degree burn.

A t-shirt and jeans. Hiking boots. She was crouched against a wall, just inside the cover of a doorway, the door itself blown out and lying a few yards away; and she did still have a gun in her other hand, tipped down and leaning against her knee.

What the fuck.

She took a quick look around. She couldn't see anybody else in the immediate area. She was—where the hell was she? She glanced out at the light, the angle of the sun, and then looked down at herself: she did still have a watch, even if it wasn't the same one she'd been wearing before. 0924, and the date was the same. That was right. And the light matched, which meant wherever she was, it was in about the same timezone. Judging by the destruction, the state this hallway was in, she was still near the coast, and maybe even still somewhere in LA.

And the overlay, the alien HUD, was still filling up her vision.

Had the device been a transporter? Something the aliens had intended to use to get around the destruction of their aircraft? Except if all it had done was move her, there was no reason for her clothes to be different. She froze for a second and looked down at her hands again—but they were fine, familiar, the faint scar on the knuckles of the right she'd gotten going over the handlebars of her bike when she was ten, the white mark on the forefinger of the left where she'd burned her hand a few years ago taking shit out of the oven.

So she hadn't been dumped into somebody else's body; it wasn't some kind of recon device, some way to infiltrate behind the lines and use random humans as spies.

The display looked almost the same: the rows of indicators were still there, shifting readouts and labels that were impossible to parse. She couldn't even begin to guess what they meant, whether they were telling her exactly what had happened and she just couldn't understand it.

She swallowed, and leveled the gun in her hands, and crept forward just a little. If she could get a better look at the street, any intersections nearby, and find a sign that was still standing, maybe she could work out her location. Find a radio, some way to get in touch with the 2-5, let Nantz know what had happened—because if she'd just vanished into thin air in front of them, what would they think? That it had vaporized her, that she was dead—

"How are you doing, Ms. Santos?"

She jerked, and twisted around on her heel so fast she almost lost her balance, even though she was only about six inches off the ground. "Sir," she said, reflexive, because it was Nantz; even before she looked, it was—the voice, that steady even tone, the way Nantz talked when he was trying to keep someone calm.

And then she looked, and it wasn't Nantz.

It was his face, his eyes. That part was right. But he wasn't in uniform. Not in a Marine's uniform, anyway. He was wearing an LAPD uniform instead, as torn and dirty as Santos's own clothes, and one of his hands was wrapped in gauze, just like Santos's arm. There was blood drying on his forehead, cuts scattered across his brow and temple and cheek like something had exploded a little too close to his head for comfort.

He was raising his eyebrows at her. "I thought we agreed on Nantz, Ms. Santos."

"Drop the Ms. and you got a deal," Santos said, automatic, trying to get her head around it: so it _was_ Nantz, except somehow he was a cop instead of a Marine staff sergeant, and she was—a civilian? Or just off-duty? Civilian, had to be. She couldn't think of a reason she wouldn't have told him she was Air Force, and if he'd known it, he'd be calling her Tech Sergeant, not— _Ms. Santos_ , of all things. Jesus.

And, sure enough, he grimaced, as if in apology. "Right," he said, like this was an amendment she'd already asked him to make. "Santos."

"No movement out this side," she reported, "and we have cover at eleven o'clock and two o'clock if we need to scout the cross-street."

There was a hum, a sweeping noise in the air, and Santos flattened herself against the wall automatically, grabbed for a fistful of Nantz's uniform and tugged him over too.

One of the drone craft, passing overhead—but that didn't make any sense. Did it?

"They still have air support?" she hissed over her shoulder at Nantz, urgent. "What happened? Have they set up a new command-and-control center already?"

Nantz was staring at her. "A _new_ command-and-control center," he repeated, and—

Shit. She was a civilian. She'd reported in like she was still talking to Staff Sergeant Nantz of the 25th. And god, this was insane, this was _insane_ , but—if, hypothetically, she was talking to LAPD Officer Nantz instead, then who the hell was in charge of the 25th? Where were they? Had they even reached the police station in the first place, without Nantz? Had anyone noticed the blackout, crossing what was left of LA last night, and gone in to paint the alien CNC for those Copperheads?

"Listen, Santos," Nantz was saying, real gentle, "I know it's been a hell of a long night, and I've asked a lot of you—more than I'd ever ask of a civilian, if I didn't have to. You should take a break, go get something to eat. Rest."

Jesus. Santos squeezed her eyes shut; the alien display hung there in front of them anyway, relentless, like it was mocking her.

"You think I've lost it," she said unsteadily.

She made herself look at Nantz again. He was watching her, brow creased a little—thoughtful, that was all. And then his mouth quirked a little, and he said softly, "Wouldn't blame you, after the day we've had."

Santos blew out a breath, reached up and rubbed a hand over her face. "Maybe I have," she said, because shit, maybe she had. Maybe this was what it was like, having a psychotic break; maybe you just blinked and decided you'd been Air Force and you'd been busy saving the day, because that was better than being a terrified civilian crouched under some rubble with a gun you didn't know how to use.

But she did know how to use it, goddammit. She had it lowered right now, finger automatically settled outside the trigger guard, discipline drilled into muscle memory so she couldn't shoot anything she wasn't trying to shoot. That had to have come from somewhere, didn't it?

"You think so?" Nantz pressed, not unkindly—because of course he wanted to know if she was really going to snap, if he had to worry about having given her a gun when they were supposed to be watching out for however many civilians were in the building behind her.

"This isn't _right_ ," Santos said. She didn't know how else to say it, how to make it sound sane when it wasn't. "None of this is right. You're—I know you, but you're a staff sergeant, Marines. I'm a tech sergeant, Air Force. We aren't supposed to be here. We've already made it out of LA with the rest of your unit. This isn't how this happens."

She stopped, bit down on the spill of words before it could get any worse. Nantz was blinking at her, bewildered, but he hadn't moved out from under her hand where she still had her fingers curled into his uniform shirt; he wasn't trying to take the gun away from her. He was probably still waiting for a punchline. To him it was just a story. He didn't get that she believed it, that it felt like reality had changed around her—

The lines of the overlay shifted. She was starting to get used to looking past them, but jesus, she shouldn't be, because there was her proof, even if she was the only one who could see it. There had been a device, and it had put this display in her head. It wouldn't be there otherwise.

She let her eyes fall shut, so she had to look at the display instead of Nantz.

It couldn't be. Could it? That thing couldn't possibly have—have rewritten the entire world. Except it was the only explanation she had for any of this that was even vaguely plausible; the indicator, the highlighting, the way it had flashed that silent countdown and then everything had changed. It didn't seem possible, but she didn't have any guesses that were better.

She swallowed hard. She might as well try. Right? If it didn't work, it didn't work. She wouldn't be any worse off than she already was, remembering shit that apparently hadn't happened, trapped in the middle of LA helping Nantz try to shepherd civilians to safety.

She didn't know what she'd done before. She moved her eyes, still closed, and focused on another shape, another indicator; stared at it as hard as she could, followed the outline of it—and something worked, because it lit up orange, just like the first one had. It lit up, and then it started to flash, and she held her breath and bit her lip and waited—

—and this time she could almost feel it happen, the world rearranging itself around her. She wasn't crouching anymore, leaning back into a crumbling wall. There was something underneath her instead; a stool, she thought, the round smooth edge of it discernible against the backs of her thighs, and then that flat hard light cleared away from her vision and left only the overlay behind, and she was in a bar.

A bar, still standing, whole. Not in LA, she understood with a lurch, heart in her throat. But it was the same day, she could tell that much from the TVs mounted high on the walls, the views they were showing of the smoke rising in the distance. Because there was nobody left who was close enough to actually broadcast live from the city.

The time was showing in the corners of the TV screens. 0926. She was probably still in California, then. Just further from the coast, further than the aliens had managed to advance. There had to be an evacuation order in place; but apparently she wasn't following it.

Maybe the bartender had. She couldn't see anybody behind the counter. There was someone sitting in the far corner of the bar, slumped in a booth, motionless—asleep, or passed-out drunk.

And beside her, next stool over, was—Nantz.

It had taken a moment for her to absorb it all, for the setting to snap into focus. But now that it had, she couldn't do anything but stare at him.

He wasn't in any kind of uniform at all this time, not Marines, not LAPD, not anything. Civilian clothes, and they looked like he'd been wearing them for about a week straight, stained and wrinkled, jeans with a gaping hole just above the knee, boots scuffed all to hell. He was leaning in over the bar on his forearms, and in front of him was a glass, two fingers in the bottom, and a bottle.

He took the glass in his hand, between two fingers and a thumb, and tossed what was in there back in one go. And then he let the glass drop to the counter with a clatter, and he fumbled for the bottle and poured himself some more.

He was—he was just drinking. Just sitting there, drinking. He could see the TVs as well as Santos could; he had to know what was going on out there, on the front lines in LA. He just didn't give a shit.

She watched, gut tight, feeling sick, as he glanced up. He fixed a dull stare on the TV for a second, and the closest one was close enough that his face lit up red-orange as the live camera view that was showing caught a massive explosion, fire blooming to fill the screen.

He watched it happen. And then he finished pouring, and set the bottle down, and picked up his glass again.

Santos swallowed, tasting bile. She'd thought it had been hard to get her head around the last one, Nantz as a patrol officer and the rest of the 2-5 nowhere in sight. But this was—she felt like she was looking at a stranger with Nantz's face, like somebody had stolen it from him and put it on. Nantz was a lot of things, stubborn and self-righteous and way too ready to die; but of all the flaws Santos might have been able to list if she'd had a minute to think about it, she'd never have imagined including that he _didn't care enough_.

God. What the hell _was_ this? What had it meant, that indicator she'd picked out, and how the fuck had it turned into _this_?

There was a glass in front of her, too. She was—she was Nantz's drinking buddy, maybe. She reached for it, tipped it back and forth in her fingers so the liquor swirled around, but she couldn't make herself drink it.

Maybe these were just simulations. Maybe the device was just flipping between possibilities; maybe she was changing settings, parameters, every time she highlighted a different indicator.

But she couldn't help thinking about the readings. The power draw they'd been getting from the device, off the charts; the emissions, frequencies they'd registered but couldn't understand.

Maybe it was real. Maybe she _was_ changing settings, parameters, except they weren't for simulations—they were for reality itself.

The last Nantz, LAPD Nantz, hadn't known what she was talking about when she'd mentioned the Marines. He hadn't seemed to remember anything except the reality he'd occupied, himself as a cop and Santos as a civilian who'd turned out to be handy with a pistol. It was Santos who'd touched the device, Santos who perceived the display; she could remember the differences, the things that changed, but nobody else could.

The last Nantz might have been able to help her anyway.

But it was hard to imagine this one would.

She cleared her throat. "Fucked up, huh?" she managed.

"Yeah," Nantz muttered, and knocked back another swallow.

"How long till they get here, you think?" she pressed. She couldn't help it, she just—Staff Sergeant Nantz _had_ to be in there somewhere, didn't he?

Nantz pushed himself up a little, eyeballed her with a grimace. "How th'fuck should I know?" he bit out.

"What are we going to do?"

He looked away again. "Don't know," he said. "Let 'em, I guess."

Jesus. She couldn't stop staring at him; her throat felt so tight she almost couldn't breathe.

"Yeah?" she spat out, suddenly furious. "That what you did when it was Lockett?"

He jerked like she'd hit him, glass toppling, spilling liquor across the bar. She'd have felt sorrier for it except that for a second, just a second, he looked awake: awake, alive, hurting, eyes wet and mouth twisting, almost recognizable.

And shit, that had to be it. She hadn't even thought about it, she'd just said it, but that reaction—the mission the Nantz she knew had gone on, the one where Lockett had died, not the one from the 2-5 but his brother, that must still have happened. Whatever setting it was that she'd changed to make this reality, it hadn't been that.

Nantz had lost Duane Lockett, the rest of his squad. And in the world she remembered, he'd kept going, stayed in the Marines despite the shit everybody had been talking about him, lasted long enough to end up deploying with the 2-5.

But maybe in this one, he hadn't. He'd left, or been discharged. She could still hear it if she tried, the way his voice had sounded on the tarmac in the ruins of the Santa Monica Airport, saying it: _They're dead. I'm here. Like the punchline to some bad joke. You think I like that? You think for one second that I wouldn't rather trade places with them?_

The Nantz she knew had hung on anyway, had figured out how to bear that at least long enough to save part of the 2-5.

But suddenly she could see it. This wasn't a stranger—this was Nantz after all. Nantz the way he could have been if it had broken him after all, if he couldn't stop hating himself long enough to keep doing his job. If he didn't think he was capable of saving people anymore; if he thought everybody was better off with him drinking himself to death in a bar.

She closed her eyes, rubbed them, in case that would make them stop stinging. It didn't really work.

"Christ, sorry," she said after a second, and it wasn't enough but she didn't know what else to say. "I'm drunk, Nantz, don't listen to me."

He laughed, ragged and harsh and unsteady, the unhappiest she'd ever seen him—and she was counting the times he'd been watching his men die in front of him. "In vino veritas," he murmured, and ignored his tipped-over glass, went for the bottle and drank straight from the mouth of it.

"No," Santos said, and took it from him, twisted on her stool and leaned over to set it down outside his reach. "I'm serious. Nantz—"

She stopped. She'd expected him to at least try to get the bottle back from her, but he hadn't; he wasn't. He was just sitting there, hand still half outstretched, right where it had been when she'd wrenched the bottle out of it. He looked lost, and sad, and so fucking tired.

"I'm sorry," Santos said again, words as clear and gentle as she could make them. "I wasn't thinking. I didn't mean it."

She touched his wrist, and it was like she'd cut his strings; his hand dropped, and she caught it, took it. His eyes fell shut. She didn't even know she was reaching for his face until she brushed it with her free hand, stubble prickling against her palm, the base of her thumb, and he shuddered but didn't move away.

"You did everything you could," she said, and he shook his head, turned his face into her hand, and shit. It didn't even matter whether this was real or not, she thought. She couldn't leave him like this.

The overlay was still there, bright in her eyeline, traced over everything she saw. She didn't hesitate for a second, didn't bother trying to guess which indicator might do what; she picked one and traced her eyes over it, and when it lit up orange and started to flash, she was grateful.

She was on a porch.

She blinked, and turned her head. A porch, a small one, attached to a cabin; nothing fancy. A clearing, surrounded by woods. The air was crisp, cool. She was up in the mountains, if she had to guess. She was in jeans again, but they were soft, lined with something, warm—and a button-down, plaid, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

She checked her watch: 0929. She was willing to bet it was the same day, same timezone. There was something wrong with the sunlight, the cast of it not quite right; and when she looked out over the tops of the trees, she could see a distant haze that had to be smoke.

She stood there, hesitating. She didn't see anybody else around. Was that bad? Had she managed to lose even Nantz? Had he been somewhere in the device's settings up until now, a constant, but this time she'd flipped that switch? Or—

"One last round?"

She turned to face the cabin, and all her breath rushed out of her at once in relief when it was Nantz.

Nantz, and god, he was—he looked good, great. He wasn't drunk this time, even though he had a couple beers in his hands; his eyes were clear, bright, crinkling a little at the corners. He wasn't _quite_ smiling, but it was close enough for Santos, the way his mouth was slanting. He looked—

He looked happy.

He glanced out at the trees, the sky, and that tempered it some. "After this, we better get moving," he added. "God knows what's happening back there, but whatever it is, I'm guessing it's not good."

And jesus, that was a relief, too. That was Michael Nantz the way Santos knew him: orders, a plan, and determined to serve in whatever capacity he was needed, to do whatever good he was going to be able to do.

She smiled, helplessly wide, because she was too grateful not to.

And then, as he crossed the porch to her and held out one of those beers, she started actually paying attention, and her heart lodged itself somewhere in the back of her throat.

She'd been too busy trying to work out where she was, and then too busy drinking in a Nantz who wasn't marinating in self-loathing, to think it through. But—she'd thought she might be alone out here, except she wasn't; it was her and Nantz. Her and Nantz, out here somewhere in the mountains, probably north of LA, together. Together, and evidently having planned to stay here longer than they were getting to.

She reached up, automatic, to take the beer bottle. And when she closed her hand around it, there was a little metallic clink.

One more half-step, and Nantz was beside her. He had one hand on his own beer. And she felt suddenly hyperaware of every inch of her skin, helplessly clocking the motion of his other hand: because it was skimming absently down the line of her back, brushing over one shoulder blade on the way, before settling comfortably in the curve of the small of it.

She leaned into the porch railing, heart pounding, and tipped her own beer to her mouth. And she knew, even before she glanced up the line of the bottle at her own hand, that she was going to see a ring.

It was her left hand; not an engagement.

She closed her eyes, and focused on swallowing the beer instead of choking.

Jesus.

She wasn't married to somebody else. She could guess that much without having to ask, which was good, because that would have been an awkward fucking question. Nantz wouldn't have—wouldn't have invited her up here on vacation, or whatever it was they were doing, if she were somebody else's wife.

She was married to Nantz. Hell of a setting she'd changed this time around.

And the worst part was, she thought, setting her beer down on the railing, she didn't even mind. She couldn't even regret it.

She was allowed to lean back into Nantz's hand, to turn into the curve of his arm. She was allowed to, and after last time, Nantz wrecked and bitter and nothing she could do to fix it, it was—she _wanted_ to. She wanted to. It was probably selfish to wallow in the reassurance of it like this, but she didn't give a damn; she'd spent the worst thirty-odd hours of her life depending on Nantz, trusting Nantz, and seeing him hollowed out like that had been a fucking gutpunch. The worst part was, it had been her fault, the fault of whatever switch she'd flipped, that he'd been like that. And now she'd erased that mistake, now he was okay, and she was so glad she could have cried.

She didn't. But it was a close thing for a minute there.

She liked Nantz; she'd known that already. He was handsome, in a rugged un-pretty kind of way she happened to be into. He really was the best CO she'd ever had—he listened to her, and he tried hard, and he didn't mind getting his hands dirty, didn't think his life was worth more than anybody else's just because he had a rank they didn't. She trusted him, and she cared about him, and she'd already pretty much told him to his face that she'd like to see him smile. It had been the truth.

But she hadn't—she hadn't gotten as far as imagining something like this.

She couldn't keep this. She had to try flipping some more switches, she had to figure out how this goddamn thing worked; if she could just get the hang of it, was there anything she couldn't do? Maybe she could undo the entire goddamn invasion, if she got the right combination. At the very least, she had to figure out how to remake a version of reality where yesterday happened the same way, where the 2-5 took out the aliens' LA CNC. That had been critical, that had turned the tide, and in a world where she and Nantz had spent yesterday oblivious and cuddling in a cabin in the mountains, it couldn't have happened. How much further might the aliens have advanced, with their air forces intact? How many more lives had been lost? She couldn't let that happen.

But she could let herself have it for a minute or two.

Once she put things back the way they were supposed to be—she wouldn't be allowed to do this. To lean into Nantz like this, touch the ring on his finger, stand there with her eyes closed and let him press a kiss into her hair. She wouldn't be allowed to do this, and he wouldn't want to. He'd be Staff Sergeant Nantz again, and she'd be the Air Force castaway who wasn't even technically part of the 25th.

She'd make it happen. She'd make that into reality again. She'd never be able to look herself in the mirror if she didn't.

But at least she could give herself the memory of it.

She didn't try to talk to Nantz about the device, the aliens. She didn't know why he didn't know what was happening; maybe they hadn't brought their phones out here, maybe they'd lost power in the first wave of the attack. Most of the action had been late in the afternoon, overnight. Maybe the two of them hadn't even noticed the smoke until this morning.

It was fine, and she was going to change it all anyway. And in the meantime, she could stand here with him on a porch, looking out into the woods, and drink a beer.

She teased him about their beer-for-breakfast menu. He told her it was five o'clock somewhere, and after the first two words she rolled her eyes and said it with him, and then made fun of him for being such a fucking cliché. He laughed, and reminded her she liked him anyway.

She almost cracked, then. She didn't mean to, didn't want to; but her eyes stung, and she had to blink hard to keep them from filling up and spilling over.

"Hey," he said gently, confused. "Hey, Santos," and that saved it; she started laughing instead, because of course he still fucking called her Santos.

"It's fine, Staff Sergeant," she said, when she could, and he grinned at her: a real smile.

It looked as good on him as she'd always thought it would.

They finished their beers too fast. He'd apparently already packed the truck. There was nothing left to do but drive back to the city.

He didn't know what was waiting for them. And he wasn't ever going to have to find out. It was weird, stupid, but she felt almost protective of Nantz—of this version of Nantz, who hadn't watched Lieutenant Martinez blow himself up, hadn't watched Joe Rincon bleed out in front of his son, hadn't watched Kerns save all of them and probably half of California besides and then die in a pile of rubble. This version of Nantz had been spared all of that, was safe and happy and didn't know what had happened to LA, and Santos was going to keep it that way.

He stopped her at the bottom of the steps, as they were heading toward the truck waiting in the driveway, and he kissed her.

She hung on, and let her eyes close, and kissed back; slow, and sweet, and thorough. The first time, and probably the last time, and he didn't know that either.

The overlay was there, behind her eyelids. She clung to Nantz, to the version of Nantz she was about to lose forever. The first time, she thought dimly, she'd been way off. Neither of them had been anywhere close to right. The second time had been closer, though, less of a change; Nantz had still been military, Marines, had still gone on a mission with Duane Lockett. This time—this time had been somewhere in between, probably. Not as far, but she and Nantz had clearly met differently, earlier, everything after that irrevocably altered.

She picked an indicator, closer to the second one she'd chosen than either of the others, and it lit up orange and started to flash with Nantz's mouth still open against hers—

—and she came down against concrete, dust filling her mouth, shoulder jammed up against something solid.

She stayed there for a second, blinking, trying to make sense of it: she was lying on the ground, face turned to one side, pressed up against what was left of a wall—that was as far as she got before something exploded, so close she could feel the bloom of heat, so loud her ears rang. She flinched reflexively, turned into the wall and curled in against it, and waited like that, tense, breathing hard, until she could hear again.

One of the alien drones, that was what it was. She didn't dare move to look for it, but with her ears working, the thrum of it, the way it displaced air as it swooped overhead, was unmistakable.

No wonder she'd been in the middle of hurling herself into cover.

And if it was the same day, the same time, the way it had been ever since this had started—her heart sank. She'd gotten closer, but not close enough. The alien CNC hadn't been found, hadn't been destroyed.

The drone did one more pass, and then moved away. Santos stayed where she was for a count of a hundred, and then finally let herself shift away from the wall, and looked down.

Okay, well, she was Air Force, at least. That was good.

She was Air Force, but she was alone. She checked, 360-degree sweep, and even risked raising her voice to shout, but there was no answer.

So she was Air Force, and she was probably still in LA, but she—she hadn't found the 25th.

Had she been too late getting to the police station? Too early? Or had they been sent in another direction entirely? She had no fucking idea, no way to tell. She checked her equipment, her pockets—found the shape of way too many dogtags, and swallowed.

She hadn't found the 25th; and apparently she'd also lost the rest of her own squad along the way.

She bit down on the inside of her cheek until her eyes quit stinging, squinting up at the sky and forcing herself to breathe.

And then, somewhere off to the left, she heard a voice.

She jerked upright, got off her ass and into a crouch and flattened herself against the remains of the wall. A couple feet along, it was low enough for her to see over even staying low like this, and she edged over one shuffling step at a time, clutching a scraped-up scavenged M16 to her chest.

She looked. Nothing was moving.

But that hadn't been an alien noise, not one of their machines, not the clicky scrabbly thing they did when they moved or the shrieky thing they did when they were hit. It had been a voice.

"Call out," she shouted again, and she was braced for more silence, her ears just playing tricks on her—but this time it was only about four seconds before there was a reply.

"Here! Over here."

And fuck. Fuck, she _knew_ that voice.

She didn't let herself think about it. She just darted out, ran to the next piece of cover she had, the wreckage of a car knocked halfway out of its parking space; crossed the street in a burst, her heart hammering in her chest, and skidded across the opposite sidewalk.

And there, tucked into the far corner of what looked like a bank counter, still standing, was Nantz.

She thought for a second she must have made it pretty goddamn close this time after all. Maybe the rest of the 2-5 was tucked in here, too; maybe she'd found them, just late. Maybe she was only one change away from where she wanted to be.

And then she took another look at him, as she rushed across the room toward him, and she realized she was wrong.

He had an M16 in his hands, two more hanging off his shoulders—that was what had fooled her. She'd thought it was his gear, his pack, and he'd just taken off his helmet.

But it was guns. Guns he must've picked up off dead soldiers in the street, because he wasn't military.

He still held himself the same way. His clothes were practically camo, so covered in concrete dust that he'd have been close to invisible pressed against the right wall, lit up from the right angle. But they were civilian: a button-down, undershirt beneath it, thick jeans that were still scraped to hell across the knees.

"Sir," she said, and she tried to say it the way she'd have said it before giving a civilian an order, not the way she'd have said it to Nantz normally, and only sort of succeeded.

He seemed to take it as a question. "Nantz," he said, keeping his voice low. "Michael Nantz."

Her throat went tight. She did her best not to let the look on her face change. "You ready to use that weapon?" she said, and then choked on half a laugh: same goddamn thing he'd said to her, when he'd seen the gun in her hands that first day.

He gave her a steady look, and then the corner of his mouth quirked up, wry, and for a second she could almost convince herself he got the joke. "You could say that," he said. "I was a Marine staff sergeant. Finished my training assignment and officially retired—two weeks ago."

This time, she figured she could let herself laugh. "Well, shit," she said. "Is that good timing or bad timing?"

"I really couldn't tell you," he murmured, taking a quick look past her at the street. "You got an extraction point?"

And it was so close to right, just then, that she thought about it like she needed to actually answer him. The evac site she remembered them using, last-ditch—that had been the only one left, and hours before this moment. No way it was still operational now. She didn't want to tell him they were going to have to hike their way to the Mojave, but she didn't know where else—

And then she caught herself, shook her head and then looked over and smiled at him. "Yes, sir, I do," she said. "Don't you worry." She closed her eyes on the sight of his face, dirt-streaked, slice across the jaw that hadn't been there any time she'd seen, one brow coming up skeptically; the overlay glowed, and she scoped out her options, tried to triangulate a little more precisely this time—

—and she stumbled, boot slipping, grabbing frantically at the rungs of the ladder in front of her, somebody below her reaching up to grip one of her ankles until she was steady.

"Good to go, Lieutenant?"

"Good," she said, automatic, and climbed: another ten feet, that was all, and then she was up, out, pushing herself up off the concrete and clearing the way for the next guy coming up.

She squinted up at the sun, and checked her watch. 0941; she really had let that second-to-last one go on, but she couldn't manage to regret it.

And only then did she stop and think—wait. Lieutenant? When the hell had she become a lieutenant?

"Orders, ma'am?"

She looked down, away from the sky, and toward Nantz.

"Staff Sergeant," she said, and only then thought to actually check his uniform. But she really had gotten close this time. He was a Marine, E-6, and—and that was Imlay coming up off the ladder, turning around and reaching down behind himself to help the next guy. Who was it? She wasn't sure. He looked familiar, but only barely. One of the guys the 2-5 had tried to evacuate, she thought suddenly. Lenihan.

Except here he was in front of her, and he wasn't dead.

And she was—she looked down at herself.

She was a Marine, too. _She_ was their lieutenant.

Goddamn.

She blinked, looked left and then right. This was the site of the alien CNC. They were on the other side of it, that was all; they'd come up out of a different part of the sewers, and later in the morning. Maybe it had taken them longer to get to the civilians at the police station, or to get them out. Maybe they'd been extracted, and then redeployed at the site of the blackout, because somebody else had had to notice it without Tech Sergeant Santos there to tell Nantz what strong enough RF signals could do.

She didn't know. Not that it mattered that much, right this second.

She gave Nantz his own orders, and man, it was weird repeating them to him, watching him nod attentively like this was the first time he'd heard them. They tossed a grenade down to slow the aliens trying to follow them up out of the sewers, tipped some rubble over the hole as an extra treat. She took the opportunity, while the rest of them were moving, to tally them up—counting her and Nantz, there were nine of them. Lenihan was there, and Stavrou, and Kerns hadn't died yet; Mottola had apparently lived, too, but she didn't see Harris anywhere.

Maybe she'd been slower than Martinez, gotten luckier. Maybe they hadn't been pinned down on the freeway, or the exit they'd wanted to take had still been intact.

She swallowed, and looked at the overlay.

She'd thought last time she might be able to undo the invasion entirely. But that didn't make sense. The aliens had created this device, had constructed it themselves, and they'd pulled it out in the aftermath of the CNC's destruction, the last ace up their sleeves. They wouldn't—they wouldn't program that setting into it. They wouldn't _want_ their invasion undone.

They'd probably been planning to use this thing to wipe out the 25th instead. Keep their command-and-control center intact, keep their drones in the air, and stop anybody from figuring out that was how to take them down—stop Nantz from getting word back to the brass, stop it from spreading around the rest of the globe from there.

But she'd flipped one of the switches they _had_ programmed into it, and now Lenihan was alive. Lenihan, Stavrou, Mottola.

How much _could_ she fix? She didn't want to swap Harris for them if she could help it; but what if she could save them _and_ Harris? What if she could make it so Martinez hadn't had to blow himself up on the freeway? Or Hector Rincon hadn't had to watch his dad die in front of him?

"Ma'am. Ma'am?"

"Laser target," she blurted.

Luckily, they still had it, though it was Stavrou who was carrying it this time around. And she knew what Nantz hadn't; painting that spiral tower with it wouldn't do shit.

"I'll radio it in," she added, before Kerns could even try to volunteer.

They all looked at her. Nantz looked furious.

"Ma'am," he said, sharp.

"I'll radio it in," she repeated, and made it stern, level, the goddamn word of God.

Nantz swallowed, jaw set. "Ma'am, you get high enough to get radio reception and you'll be a sitting duck—"

"Can it, Staff Sergeant," she said. "I'll call it in, you paint the target— _when it shows_. We saw that thing from below, it's bigger than just that tower. They know we've found it, and they're probably going to try to evac. Once it's exposed, that's when you give them a lightshow. Understood?"

She wasn't going to die. She could change it first, probably. And if she couldn't, then like hell was she sending Kerns up there to get crushed again.

But of course Nantz didn't know it. He knelt there, glaring at her intently, while she split the rest of them up to hold the area. And then, before she could go start climbing, he caught her arm.

At least he'd waited until the rest of them weren't right there watching. If you were going to be insubordinate, that was the polite way to do it.

"Staff Sergeant—"

"Ma'am," he said, quick, like he wanted to get it out before she could order him not to. "Please don't. Please, I—let me."

Jesus. "Nantz," she said quietly, "I've got this."

His throat worked. He didn't seem able to let go of her arm.

"Nantz," she said again, and put a hand over the back of his wrist. "Trust me."

He looked at her, searching. "I do trust you, ma'am," he said at last, very low.

And it was the worst possible time for it, but damn, that felt good to hear; she couldn't help but smile. "Retreat?" she murmured.

His grip on her arm tightened briefly, and then he did let go. "Hell," he whispered, and she squeezed his wrist and then turned around before she could talk herself out of it.

Because she knew what she was doing. Sort of. And she could fix this. Probably.

She reached the ruins of the building, the same one Kerns had climbed to radio out. She gripped the edge of what was left of the first floor ceiling, and pulled herself up; and then she crawled carefully to the corner and sat down, tipped her head back against the scorched wall and closed her eyes.

The aliens had intended to use this thing to make today go the way they'd wanted it to. But they weren't going to be able to stop her from using it first.

She'd only ever tripped one indicator at a time before. She'd never tried to do it any other way; the first time, it had been an accident, and after that she'd just been trying to figure out what the hell was going on, what she was doing and why it was happening. The last couple times were the first opportunities she'd used to actually try and pick an indicator with some kind of rationale in mind.

They _did_ seem to be organized. She still couldn't read the labels, couldn't understand any of the scrolling text, but at least she had something to go on.

And she'd started to be able to—to almost tell when it was working, what it was doing. She'd started to be able to perceive a certain sensation of change occurring, reality reordering itself.

This time, she picked an indicator, and waited for it to go orange. And before it had even started flashing, she picked another.

Once she had three going at the same time, she felt a funny kind of pressure in her head. She wasn't—she wasn't touching the wall that had been behind her, not anymore; the floor was gone from beneath her. The world she'd constructed had come apart, but the next one hadn't formed, not quite yet.

And then, abruptly, the overlay changed.

It didn't just cover her own view, her own line of sight. It was like she was rising up above it in an F-18, so high the horizon was a shining curve; she could _see_ it, the whole surface of Earth itself encompassed by it, and somehow, like this, she could hold the entire thing in her head. And it wasn't just the surface of the planet, it was everything and everyone on it. The indicators, the way they mapped themselves out, each tiny fork in a trillion roads—it was _all_ there.

The three indicators she'd picked weren't the ones she wanted. She looked over the entire display, the map of it spread out before her, and held it tight; and she deactivated those three, and reached for the ones she did want instead.

Here, here was the alien drone that had come upon the police station. She nudged it along, until it got there two minutes earlier—until the helo that had come to evacuate the injured members of the 25th had to back off, forced away, instead of coming in to land and being blown up on its way out. And here, even earlier, here was the 2-5 on their way in, before she'd even met them; an alien missile launched two seconds later, and suddenly two men weren't injured in the first place, half a face never burned off.

She found the freeway, sliding not in three dimensions but in four: yeah, here she was, clambering up on top of that truck—and here was that fucking strap that had gotten stuck and trapped her there. One tweak, and it didn't catch in the crumpled metal on the surface of the truck. She watched herself roll away, watched Stavrou follow, and when the truck exploded, nobody was on it anymore.

It got harder as she kept going, changes stacking up in her mind's hands, metaphysical fingers pinching down, trembling, to try to hold them in place while she reached out and made another. Joe Rincon stumbled, fell to the pavement, and the shot that had been headed for him didn't hit him. Lieutenant Martinez didn't have to get hit, either, and when he wasn't injured, he could get to the C4 faster, blow it remotely. Kerns was quicker with the radio, the alien drone slower to zero in on his location, and by the time it fired its missiles he was halfway down the side of the building—he got clipped by rubble, fell and broke his arm, burned half his hair off, but he was alive—

God, her head hurt. She was dimly surprised at the reminder that she had one, that she was still connected to it. She was—was she breathing? She didn't know how to tell.

But she was almost there. She was almost there. Just one more: the evacuation order, it could go out earlier. She could make it go out earlier. She couldn't save everybody, but she could get close, and goddammit, she had to try. Retreat, _hell_ —

Everything was flashing, fast, bright. She hung on to it all, every single setting at once, as tightly as she could, and then her whole mind went white.

She gasped, and fell.

Someone caught her. There were voices; she couldn't figure out what they were saying, couldn't get the rush of sounds to turn into words. There was something on her face, hot, sticky, and the taste of salt in her mouth. She was—she was bleeding, she understood dimly, from the nose, and maybe the ears.

She blinked, once and then again. Everything seemed dim and blurred, but as the ache in her head settled into a steady throb, it all came into focus.

"—answer me, Santos. Santos! Jesus fucking Christ—"

"Staff Sergeant," she croaked.

And Nantz's hands tightened, clenched in the back of her uniform. He was the one who'd caught her when she fell; something passed across his face, a fierce desperate relief, and then he swallowed, cursed again under his breath and fumbled the hand that wasn't holding most of her weight up to wipe at the blood on her face.

Standing at his shoulder, peering down at her anxiously, was Lenihan.

"Shit," Lenihan said, shifting his weight. "Is she going to be okay?"

"I'm fine," Santos said, and tried to push herself up, and lucky for her Nantz still had a fist closed on her uniform, because she almost went over again. "Lenihan—Stavrou? Martinez—"

"They're not the ones who touched some alien scrap heap and then went catatonic," Nantz said. And he said it dryly, casually. Easily.

He said it like they were alive.

"They just don't know how to have fun," Santos said aloud, and then she fumbled a hand up and found Nantz's elbow. "And you're okay?"

Nantz's brows drew down a little. "Santos—"

"Oh, shit. Shit, I didn't fix Lockett's brother." She _knew_ she'd forgotten something, god-motherfucking-dammit—

"Santos!" Nantz wasn't letting go of her; he caught her arm where she was trying to twist back toward the device, and tugged her away. "Santos, Jesus Christ, do not touch that again."

"Seriously," Lenihan said, "there is blood coming out of your _face_."

"But I have to—"

"No, you don't. Santos—Santos, listen to me. We're good. We're all good. It's okay. It's enough."

He didn't know what he was talking about, Santos thought dimly. He couldn't. None of the other Nantzes had; no one had ever remembered anything she'd changed, except her.

But he was saying it anyway, and it was Nantz. It was hard not to believe it.

"It's enough," Nantz repeated, and helped her up, drew her arm over his shoulder.

The rest of the squad was right behind them—the explosives were all set to go, spread out around the edges of the room. Santos wondered vaguely how long they'd been ready, just trying to figure out how to get her loose, what was wrong with her and whether there was anything they could do that wasn't going to give her brain damage.

"Wait," she managed. "Wait. That thing. We have to blow that thing, too. We can't leave it here. We can't let them get to it."

Nantz looked at her, and then at Lenihan.

"On it," Lenihan said instantly, and Santos twisted around and got half a glimpse of him starting to stack up C-4 around the base of the device before Nantz tugged her forward again.

"Come on, Santos," he said, almost gentle. "He's got it. We're taking care of it."

"Okay," she said dizzily. "All right," and she let him help her limp back out of the complex, into the hazy sunlight of mid-morning.

She managed to wait until it was over—until they were on the way out, the smoking wreck of the alien FOB growing small behind them—before she asked.

"Staff Sergeant," she shouted, over the rush of the wind and the noise of the helo. "Lieutenant Martinez—"

Nantz gave her a narrow-eyed look, but he answered the implicit question anyway. "He's fine, Santos. Took a hit, got some nasty burns and a broken arm. They're looking after him on base."

"And Mr. Rincon," she said. "Hector."

His eyes got narrower. "They're okay, too. We delivered them safely to the Mojave. Santos—"

"The veterinarian?"

"She's fine," he said, a little more sharply. "Safe and sound. Beginning to think you might not be. What the hell is this about? What did that device—"

He stopped before he'd finished the question. Probably because of the way she was grinning at him.

Which was fair enough, because her face was aching with it; her lip split, dry and cracking, and it hurt like hell, and she still couldn't stop.

"I'm fine, Staff Sergeant," she shouted.

She let it lie for the rest of the flight, settled back to enjoy the wind in her hair and the sun on her face, the sheer fucking delight of having pulled it off after all; but he kept an eye on her the whole way, and she wasn't surprised when the first thing he did when they landed back in Mojave was pull her aside.

"Do I need to personally escort you to a med tent, Santos?" he said.

"I really am fine, sir—"

"Then what the hell was with those questions you were asking?" Nantz demanded, eyes flicking back and forth across her face, searching. "You don't remember yesterday?"

Santos looked at him. On the one hand, he probably _was_ going to march her to a med tent if she tried to tell him everything. On the other hand—he'd been there. He'd seen that thing. Was it really going to be the most bizarre thing that had happened to him in the last 48 hours, learning what that device had really been for?

Plus she'd never been a particularly good liar anyway.

"I do remember yesterday, sir," she said at last. "Just not the same version of yesterday as you."

Nantz raised an eyebrow. "If this is some kind of 'your green isn't my green' shit, Tech Sergeant—"

Santos couldn't help it; she laughed, a helpless huff through her nose. "No, sir," she said. "The alien device in that FOB—changed things, sir."

"Changed things," he repeated, but the eyebrow had gone down again; he was really listening now, sober, grave, gaze steady.

"I think it was their ace in the hole, sir," Santos said. "Possibly even an experiment. They may not have been planning to attempt to use it, at first. Not until we took out their command-and-control center." She paused, split-second. "We did take out their CNC, sir?"

"Yeah, Santos," he said slowly. "We did."

Santos blew out a breath. She'd been pretty sure she'd managed to keep that the same, but it had been so hard to tell at the end, that last head-splitting rush of it, trying to hold everything together until it could make itself manifest.

"They didn't want that to happen. They didn't want us to succeed, and they _really_ didn't want us explaining how to do it to the rest of the world. So they were going to change it."

"And you're telling me you changed things instead," he said.

He'd meant for that to come out skeptical, pressing for her to admit she was fucking with him, to tell him it wasn't true after all. But he couldn't quite pull it off, even before his breath caught on the last word, his eyes suddenly sharp.

"Lieutenant Martinez," he said.

Santos bit her lip, squeezed her eyes shut.

"Jesus," he breathed. "What happened to him, Santos? The yesterday you remember—"

"He saved us," she said unsteadily, blinked her eyes open and forced herself to look him in the eye. "He saved us, sir."

"And Joe Rincon," Nantz said in a rush, "Hector—"

"Hector was fine," Santos said, and then stopped herself, looked away and shook her head a little. "It was different, Staff Sergeant," she amended, as evenly as she could. "That's all. It doesn't matter."

Because it was true. It didn't matter, not now. She'd fixed it, and he didn't need to know what it had been like before, how bad it had gotten. He didn't need that in his head.

She was stuck with it, probably. But that was all right. It would get better, after a while. She'd go find Martinez, Stavrou—even Joe Rincon, if she could. She'd go see them, alive and whole in front of her, and then it wouldn't matter so much to her either.

"And you changed it," Nantz was saying.

"I didn't know that was what was happening, at first," she admitted. "Everything was just—different. The first time, I was a civilian. You were a cop; you'd gathered a bunch of us together in a building that was holding up okay. You'd given me a gun, and you had me on watch."

She paused, because he'd gone still. He'd caught her by the shoulder to pull her aside, around the back of a munitions tent, out of earshot of everybody else, and he'd left his hand there; it had tightened when he'd thought there was something really wrong with her, and now it had loosened, lightened, in shock.

She raised an eyebrow at him.

And he looked at her and swallowed, wet his lips, and admitted in an undertone, "I thought about it, years ago."

"The police academy," she filled in.

"Yeah," he said. "I didn't go for it, obviously. But I thought about it. And," he added slowly, "I never told you that."

He was starting to believe it. She could see it in his face.

"And the second time?" he pressed, after a moment.

She cleared her throat. "You'd—left, after Lockett's brother. Or let yourself be kicked out, or—I don't know. Something else happened to me. Discharge. We were drinking buddies."

She tried to say it calmly, just an after-action report for her CO; but his mouth flattened into a line, his jaw tight.

"I was fucked up," he said.

"A little bit, sir," Santos agreed, as gentle as she could make it.

And he was caught now, intrigued despite himself; both those answers were plausible, places he could see himself having gone if things had been different, and it lined up with everything she'd already told him, her best guess as to what the machine was for.

Which meant, she thought, he was going to ask about the third time next, and shit.

"Anyway," she said, too loudly, "you get the picture, Staff Sergeant. I figured out how it worked, and I fixed the things that went wrong yesterday. It's fine."

For a second, he was teetering on the edge of buying it. She could tell.

But she'd never been a particularly good liar.

And he looked at her for a moment longer, appraising, and then tilted his head and said quietly, "What don't you want to tell me, Santos?"

She swallowed hard.

He was right: she didn't want to tell him. She didn't want to say it. She couldn't figure out how, anyway—how to capture it, that cabin, the easy closeness they'd had; the rings, and the way he'd touched her, and how much she'd liked it.

But she was in the 2-5, even if it was only going to stick until the Air Force figured out where she'd gone and reassigned her.

_Retreat? Hell!_

"You asked," she said unsteadily, a warning and a challenge at the same time. And then she pressed forward against his hand on her shoulder, leaned up into his space, and kissed him.

She didn't linger over it, didn't make a fuss about it. Quick, firm. A statement, that was all: an answer to his question.

And then she pulled away.

He startled, belatedly, at almost the same moment, and their noses bumped for an instant. At first, he was just staring at her, face blank, and something in her chest squeezed itself down tight like it was trying to fit behind insufficient cover, knowing it was about to take fire.

But then he cleared his throat, and the line of his mouth changed—softened, and then slanted up at one corner, warm and a little wry.

"I—can't answer that with anything right now except a reminder that I'm currently your commanding officer, Tech Sergeant," he said, low.

"Understood, sir," Santos said, equally quiet.

"But," he said.

Santos raised an eyebrow.

He flushed, just a little, showing through in the handful of places where the surface of his skin was actually visible under all the grime and dried blood.

"Well. That, uh. That won't be the case once you're reassigned to a new Air Force unit. Tech Sergeant."

"That's true, sir," Santos agreed.

"So," Nantz said, and cleared his throat again. "Perhaps we can—revisit this discussion at a later date."

Which was about ten times more than she'd thought she could hope for, and she gaped at him helplessly for a second before she caught herself and smiled instead.

"I'd like that, sir," she managed.

And he looked at her, and that slant his mouth had taken on turned into a smile in return: a real one, one she wasn't going to have to wipe away.

"All right, Tech Sergeant. Let's grab some chow and resupply. We've still got work to do."

"Yes, sir," Santos said.


End file.
